This paper reports the methods and findings of the Study of Primary Interactive Teaching (SPRINT) project carried out in English primary schools, which set out to determine teachers' understanding and use of 'interactive teaching' as a characteristic of 'successful teaching' in the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). Thirty teachers of children aged five to 11 years became either 'focus' teachers or 'comparison ' teachers and were videoed twice over a six to eight month period doing 'interactive teaching' during the daily Literacy Hour as part of the NLS. The focus teachers were videoed doing interactive teaching in a different curriculum area and they participated in a process of video stimulated reflective dialogue (VSRD) with a higher education based research partner. Semi-structured interviews, held with every teacher before and after the fieldwork period, were analyzed to show teachers' changing conceptualizations of interactive teaching. In addition the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) was used to measure teachers' concerns about interactive teaching, and systematic observations were made of the video data. The results revealed few differences between the focus and comparison groups but provide significant evidence that whilst teachers have increased levels of interactivity dramatically by increasing the frequency of their questions, they still spent over half the time giving information and telling children what to do. Cognitive challenge was significantly higher in the literacy hour but lower in other Downloaded by [University of California, San Francisco] at 10:curriculum areas for children aged eight to 11 years, whereas children aged five to seven years lower levels of cognitive challenge were experienced in literacy than in other curriculum areas. Finally, a major shift away from teachers asking children about how they might do their work compared with pre-NLS levels, suggests that literacy hour teaching is more likely to engender learned helplessness than independent learning.

Previous experiments have suggested that, contrary to traditional recommendations, bizarre images are no better than commonplace images as aids to recall. This study, however, indicates that, when other variables are controlled, bizarreness has a strong effect on both immediate and delayed unexpected recall of sentences, whether bizarreness is judged by the experimenter or by each individual subject. Results are discussed in terms of motivation and interference.

Bizarre mental images have been advocated as ‘artificial’ memory aids for students since the time of the ancient Greek teachers of rhetoric, yet the few recent experiments in this area, mostly on adults, have generally found bizarreness to be unimportant. In this experiment, 108 12‐year‐olds recalled words from sentences they had rated as producing bizarre images significantly better than they recalled the same words from sentences rated as producing ordinary images. This was true for both expected and unexpected immediate recall, and for unexpected long‐term recall (P < 0·01 in all cases). A tentative explanation is offered in terms of a cognitive approach to perception itself, suggesting that bizarre images might have properties similar to Berlyne's ‘collative’ stimulus variables, involving subjects at something close to ‘the optimum level of arousal’.

Summary. In an attempt to relate recent experimental findings of the effectiveness of the keyword technique in vocabulary learning more closely to actual classroom practice, an exploratory questionnaire suggested that many teachers probably do set vocabulary learning in spite of the objections to it from the currently popular audio‐visual courses. A pilot experiment showed that the keyword technique, adapted for a group setting, improved both the immediate and delayed recall of 11‐year‐olds, while textual analysis suggested that the method might be applied to a useful portion of the words which children actually have to learn. A second experiment suggested that poor and successful learners approach vocabulary learning rather differently when left to their own devices, and further experimental groups confirmed the value of the technique for children of various levels of ability.

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